Steve Irwin, the Australian crocodile hunter and television personality who died today at the age of 44, routinely brushed aside the dangers of his daredevil lifestyle.

"I have no fear of losing my life, if I have to save a koala or a crocodile or a kangaroo or a snake, mate, I will save it," he said, in a characteristic confident statement.

"Crikey, mate. You’re far safer dealing with crocodiles and western diamondback rattlesnakes than the executives and the producers and all those sharks in the big MGM building."

In the end it was a stingray that killed him, piercing his chest with its poisoned tail barb in a freak accident while diving off the coast of Queensland, north-eastern Australia. Tearful friends said that he died the way he would have wanted, working with the wildlife he loved and passionately championed through his Discovery channel animal shows.

Irwin was born in Melbourne in 1962 to animal-loving parents, who packed in their jobs as a plumber and a nurse in the 1970s to move north to Queensland and open a reptile zoo.

Times were hard at the outset, and Steve was deeply affected when his mother was killed in a car crash. His father brought him up, nurturing his love of animals and encouraging him to believe he could follow it as a career.

To raise extra cash Steve worked as a crocodile trapper for suburban households, ridding residential neighbourhoods of wandering crocs in return for a fee.

He said later that fortune began to smile on him when his future wife turned up to start work at the Irwin family zoo. He was doing a crocodile demonstration at the time, and the two bonded over their shared love of wildlife and the great outdoors.

The couple married in 1992, and shared an unconventional honeymoon in the wilderness with a four-strong film crew. They made two wildlife documentaries, one of which went on to be a hit. It was Irwin's first appearance on television.

His Crocodile Hunter show followed the same year, featuring Irwin in his trademark khaki shorts and shirt engaged in a series of ever more death-defying antics. Australia lapped it up, but it was America that really took him to their hearts.

He took over the once-struggling zoo, which by the time of his death employed 500 people and was one of Australia's biggest tourism draws.

A 2004 controversy when he appeared on camera taking his one-month-old baby son with him to feed the crocodiles damaged his reputation for a while.

"What I would do differently is I would make sure there were no cameras around," he said later in a television interview. "I will continue to educate my children and the children of the world so they don’t go into the water with crocs."

Later that year he was accused of getting too close to penguins, a seal and humpback whales in Antarctica while making a documentary. He denied wrongdoing, and the Australian Environment Department investigation recommended no action be taken against him.

He continued to be used as an ambassador to promote Australia overseas, appearing in the "G'day LA" tourism and trade promotion in California in January.

Alexander Downer, the Australian foreign minister, used a family photograph taken at Irwin's huge reptile zoo in Queensland as the image on his official Christmas card last year.

"The minister knew him, was fond of him and was very, very appreciative of all the work he'd done to promote Australia overseas," said Mr Downer's spokesman.

Bernard Lagan, the Times correspondent in Sydney, said: "He was a very Australian kind of character - maybe not the most attractive type, but a genuine one-off.

"When it came to wildlife and danger he was respected - not that many people go out and do what he did. He was the real thing."

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